About

I have been fortunate to engage in a wide variety of work – as a political scientist and quantitative scholar teaching at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Virginia; as a data scientist engaged in applied work with the Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service; as a researcher bridging applied and academic interests often with community partners; and as a consultant and leader creating UVA’s StatLab and envisioning and building out a Data Science Services team in the UVA Library.

I’m currently the Director of Research Data Services and the Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences in the UVA Library, where I lead an amazing team of statistical and computational consultants, data curation and data discovery librarians, research software specialists, and subject librarians.

And I’ve been grateful to find many generous and creative partners along the way who’ve invited me to be part of collaborative work. Current partners include:

  • Community Policy, Analytics, and Strategy Lab (CommPAS), co-directing a community-oriented research initiative with Paul Martin in the Batten School of Public Policy and the UVA StatLab,
  • Public Interest Data Lab, leading a curricular lab in the Batten School of Public Policy designed to provide data science experience to students oriented towards justice,
  • The Global Policy Center’s Humanitarian Collaborative, working with David Leblang on on predictive analytics for humanitarian goals,
  • The Virginia Equity Center, partnering with Barbara Brown Wilson and the Democratization of Data Initiative to co-create a regional equity atlas with our community.

In the last five years, my interests have taken a sharp turn towards action-based research, using the tools of data science to promote accountable governance, make visible racial and other social inequities, and impact public policy and movement building – a more action-based research agenda. More importantly, I hope I’m mentoring the amazing young people I get to work with at UVA to engage this work early in their careers.

Also, sometimes I play the mandolin, pretend I’m learning to play the banjo, and harbor a dream of joining a home-grown bluegrass band!

Community-Engaged Projects

Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas

  • The Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas project is a collaboration between the University of Virginia Library, the Equity Center, and the broader regional community to imagine and co-create a platform to combine, visualize, and make accessible data about local disparities.
  • Partially funded by an IMLS Community Catalyst grant

Cville Region COVID Equity and Recovery

  • In response to COVID, we began partnering with the UVA Global Policy Center to organize, visualize, and share data about COVID crisis response to inform equitable recovery. This is a rapidly evolving effort to provide easily accessible measures sought and shared by community organizations and members. We’re seeking to make accessible data to support all those working to improve lives, promote community resilience, create a more equitable processes, policies, and structures for our community.

Public Interest Data Lab

  • The Public Interest Data Lab is intended to provide data science experience to students in service of the public interest. We practice working collaboratively, openly, inclusively, and reproducibly.
  • Generating a series of studies in partnership with Charlottesville’s Department of Social Services to examine racial and other disparities in the local child welfare ecosystem.

Charlottesville Region’s NGO Sector

  • An interactive resource to better understand the size, scope, and emphasis of our local NGO sector.

CommPAS Lab

  • More work from the Community, Policy, Analytics, and Strategy Lab, including:
  • Racial Identity in the Provision of Homelessness Services in the Charlottesville Continuum of Care, 2018 Report to City of Charlottesville’s Department of Social Services on Racial Disparities in the Child Welfare System, regional foundation grantors and grantees dasbhoard, and estimating regional energy inequity.

Research Projects

Predictive Analytics for Humanitarian Goals

  • Working to build and evaluate models of displacement that can be of use in humanitarian response.
  • Part of UVA’s Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy’s Global Policy Center, in partnership with Save the Children, International

Project First Gen +

  • Re-imagining UVA as a place where first generation and lower income students thrive
  • Working with first-gen and low-income students to create research and knowledge for advocacy and change.

The Public Presidency Project

  • Developing new ways for the public to engage political news, one that allows people to monitor the activities and attentions of government from a relatively high level, that encourages the consumption of information from multiple and varied sources, and that lowers the barriers to attentive citizenship in ways that reduce inequalities in time, education, and access.
  • In other words, using machine learning to promote collective civic capacity. Here’s an early presentation: https://datafordemocracy.github.io/engagingnews/index.html

Demographic Analysis

Presidential campaigns, citizen participation, social capital

  • My book examines how citizens learn and use accountability standards during presidential campaigns.
  • Other peer-reviewed publications focus on how campaigns mobilize, congressional responsiveness to citizen participation, how social capital promotes policy accountability, how women’s political enagement is shaped by political structures, and more.

Workshops and Instruction

Analyis of UVA’s Ours to Shape Submissions

  • A multi-part example of text analysis in R
  • Examining the comments submitted to UVA’s new president’s Ours to Shape website.

PhD Plus: Data Science Essentials in R

  • We partnered with UVA’s new PhD Plus program to create a six-session series to build data analysis, wrangling, and visualization skills
  • And used the opportunity to dig deeper into Albemarle County Real Estate data as part of an ongoing partnership with the County.

RDS Workshops

  • Contributions to our UVA Library Data Workshop series
  • Including data wrangling, linear modeling, text as data (sentiment analysis, topic modeling, classification), survival analysis, matching methods, mulitiple imputation, cluster analysis, mixed-effects models

Library Projects

RDS Dashboard

  • A dashboard describing the work of the UVA Library’s Research Data Services and Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences teams.

Understanding Journal Use

  • To better understand usage patterns and costs of big deal journal packages, we’ve begun to analyze data on the number of articles downloaded from a given journal as well as metrics on the the number of articles published by UVA authors, the number of citations to a journal by UVA authors, and the the number of articles available via open-access.
  • Part of our prepration for the impending “big deal” negotiations.

Estimating Library Use with Network Logs

  • A pilot study using aggregated log data from wifi access points in library buildings to investigate the number of unique visitors to library spaces as well as the timing, duration, and characteristics of visitors.
  • And we’re using it now as background data in conversations about re-opening library spaces for the upcoming COVID fall.

Budget forecasting

  • Budget model forecasts to support library administration as we move to a responsibility-centered budget model.

DH Lightning talk: 2016 Presidential Debates

CV/Resume

See a mostly complete CV

And a brief resume